With the release of Halo 2, its much anticipated multiplayer action, and a coupon for two free months of Xbox Live in every box, I bet a lot of people are looking for ways to get their Xbox online. My situation is that my Xbox is too far away from my router to string cable, and I don't feel like shelling out $100 bucks for an ethernet - wireless bridge when I have a perfectly good iBook (original clamshell) doing nothing.

I thought it would be as simple as turning on Internet sharing and plugging in an ethernet cable, but alas, the Xbox refused to acknowledge the connection. It agreed that a cable was connected, but steadfastly refused to get out to the `Net. After a few hours of frustration, and much Googling, here are the two "gotchas" to look out for:

If you're using an older Mac, then you must use a cross-over cable, not a standard patch cable. This is easy to identify. With both your Mac and your Xbox connected, open the Network control panel. Make sure that you're showing the Network Status section. If Built-in Ethernet's status light is red, you need a cross-over cable. If it is yellow or green, you're okay.

For whatever reason, the Xbox will not accept DHCP info from the Mac. Everything else I've ever tried will, but not the XBox. Monkeying with bootP or NetInfo is more than I want to tackle. The workaround is to manually enter the IP info for your Intenet Sharing Mac's subnet in the XBox live menus. Unless you've made changes, your info should be the same as mine:

IP: 192.168.2.x (x being the number your want to give your Xbox; anything greater than 1 will be fine.)

Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0

Router: 192.168.2.1

DNS: You'll need to get this from your ISP, everyone's is different)

That's it. Oh, one more thing -- don't let your Mac go to sleep or Internet Sharing turns off, and you have to manually restart it.

Oh man! I didn't even think of this! I have the exact same situation and I was going to spend a couple of nights this week running an ethernet port to the wall behind my TV/Xbox (went to Home Depot this past weekend to buy all the hardware).

I will be trying this when I get home tonight with my G4 iBook and post the results.

2 more thins that go along with this hint (i did it on friday when i signed up for XBox Live! to play Halo 2 online)

1) if you are running the firewall on your mac, you need to open up 3 ports (3074, 88, 53) otherwise the XBox will refuse to connect to live.

2) i had issues hosting halo 2 parties. some times it worked, other times it didn't - i only knew this because the friend i was inviting was on iChat at the same time. as soon as i switched to a live IP address, (i realized that there shouldn't be any need for a firewall for my xbox, it doesn't run any services!) hosting halo 2 parties worked fine. i realize not everyone has 8 IP addresses hooked up to their broadband connection, but if you have an extra IP, go ahead and give it to the xbox. it just works better.

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vacuums do not suck. they merely provide an absence that allows other objects to take the place of what becomes absent.

Could you expand on your second comment? I am using Internet Sharing to get my XBox onto XBox live and I cannot host parties. I have a very basic understanding of networking, so a more elaborate explanation would help. Thanks.

I have a Cisco ATA from Vonage that refuses to accept a DHCP offer from OS X internet sharing over ethernet. This was with Jaguar and Panther, clean installations. Tried with iBook and PowerBook. I watch with Ethereal and see the ATA make a request and see the Mac make an offer, but the ATA doesn't seem to accept it.

The ATA works great (I'm very pleased with Vonage and the Cisco ATA) behind a standard consumer router. But it'd be nice to share my wireless internet connection while in a hotel room.

I have the same problem getting a Vonage box (Cisco ATA 186) to get an IP from my iBook in 10.3.6. If you've figured it out, let me know. If not, here's my story in case there's something useful there...

I'm sharing the Airport connection (Airport Express) and have the ATA plugged into built-in ethernet. The ATA's light blinks slowly, indicating it's trying, but no luck. If I unplug it and plug in my Linksys router, it goes right on line -- and if I plug the ATA into the router, shazam! I get a dial tone. But the whole idea here was to avoid carrying the router around. It's a mystery to me why the ATA can't get an IP number on its own.

If you pick up the handset, press the button on the ATA and dial 21#, you will hear the IP number. (details on all this at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/gatecont/ps514/products_administration_guide_book09186a00800c496e.html) When I connect directly, it reports 0.0.0.0, which means I can't even get to the ATA's web admin page to tell it to use IP 192.168.0.2, which I think is what the Mac wants it to be.

I've tried with a crossover cable and a straight one, stopped and started internet sharing, turned off the firewall, cycled the ATA on and off, etc and still no luck. I'm wondering if this has something to do with port forwarding -- I read somewhere that you have to forward UDP 5060-5061, 10000-20000 to the client IP (though since I can't get it to pick up an IP, this wouldn't be possible, I suppose).

I read (at http://www.geeksrus.com/archives/cat_vonage.html) that Vonage will upgrade you to a Motorola V1000 ATA for around $60. That one has two ethernet ports so you can put it between the router and the modem (so I could use my Airport Express, which has no wired ethernet connections) but I want to use sharing so I can make calls from other wifi hotspots.

Sorry, that should have been 192.168.2.x as has been pointed out in various posts in this thread. Anyway, from what I read in the Cisco manual, I don't think you could change if even if you could get to the web config page.

It worked! I played Xbox live for about 3 hours last night through my ibook shared internet connection. Awesome!

An additional note, I bought my xbox before xbox live was available, so the xbox live and network settings menus didn't appear in my dashboard. I thought maybe they would only show up if the xbox detected a network connection or something. I tested the connection from my iBook with a PC, worked fine. Searched the internet. Scratched my head. Then I found a tiny blurb on some Australian website that mentioned that you could start xbox live by starting up an xbox live enabled game. So I put my Halo 2 game in, and viola! It detected the network connection and then installed the missing software/menus onto my xbox! Now the dashboard is all up to date with the xbox live and network settings menus!

It was at this point that I could actually start using this hint to fix the network issues in the xbox, and it worked perfectly. Nice job.

That's the way xbox live works. Infact, to be able to use any game with live, most games will require that you install new software. All live compatible games contain the latest version of xbox live. Basically each time that it asks you to install everytime you try to play a new game on live it is just installing software that allows you to do things like create icons, read friends lists, etc..

THANK YOU! I've been trying to figure this problem out from even before Halo2 came out... I was basicaally trying to do the same thing... but having the XBOX connect wirelessly... with the XBOX wireless adapter... never got it to work until I introduced a router... and even then it was touch and go... I would still love to know how to get the XBOX to connect wirelessly to shared internet from my G4... but for now... THIS ROCKS! Thanks!

I am a novice mac os x user and this hint seems to rather straight forward but after 4 hours of trying i could not get my xbox to connect. i am using an ibook connecting to the internet via ABS. i couldn't even find the right ip address ( is it the 10.0.1 number or what?) also, if my ISP randomly distributes default gateway addresses can i even connect?

The IP address info you should enter in the Xbox live menus is the info listed in the original hint: 192.168.2.xxx

The only section that may differ for you is the DNS servers, which vary depending on your ISP. You can find these in your Network preferences. (Someone has noted that you can simply use 192.168.2.1 and your Mac will forward the DNS requests.)

To Gyroslice, I was in that situation for several hours. I can give you a conclusive answer to you: The guy earlier that gave a DNS code and said you needed nothing else was right.
All you do is turn internet sharing on over your network or standard connection via your in built ethernet port. Plug your xbox into the port. You will get a connection trouble shooter when you turn on your xbox. Go to settings (this is on the xbox) and turn the IP stuff onto default. Go to DNS address and enter the code that was given previously by Alceste (PS thanks to him, he saved me many hours of pain) into the primary address. It did for me. This should work. I am doing this out of empathy for your situation. I know how annoying it is and I would hate to think bad words might be spoken to your mac computer.

I've used this information to successfully connect to Xbox Live but I am unable to play Halo 2 games- I get dropped from a game shortly after joining it. Interestingly enough, this also happens if I plug the Xbox into the LAN port of my Airport (dual Ethernet). I think the problem is with the Airport. Are there any portmapping settings which need to be set? Xbox Live works flawlessly if I plug the Xbox directly to my cable modem.

Great stuff. Will the same workaround apply to a wireless ethernet bridge? I've got one I used when my wireless LAN was Windows-oriented, but now I'm using Airport Express. Now the Xbox says it can't find the bridge, let alone the signal for the LAN. Help!

I can't get this to work!
I re-did all the instructions like, 3 times over and it still gets stuck at
"DNS not resolved". I have an iBook G3 500 "Snow" using Airport, made sure I had a crossover cable and checked all my internet sharing settings. Still, every time I try to use Live I get problems with the DNS. Can anybody help?
Wil

Well I got the DNS fixed by manually giving my built-in-ethernet an IP address.
I just made it 192.168.2.xx. But then, the ethernet took over the connection and my wireless connection stopped working! Of course, the xbox couldn't connect to Live. I tried a direct connection to my router and that worked fine.
Anybody have any idea how I can get the wireless to work?

I can't get the Xbox to pass its DNS test either... I've tried a number of things so far... the Xbox does not seem to want to accept DHCP information from the MAC, so I have entered all of the information manually, but so far no luck. If I knew more about networking I don't think this would be that difficult... but I simply don't know the order of operations for troubleshooting these things. Anyway, if anyone has any ideas on why it would continue failing its DNS test, I would love to hear it. Thanks.

This is not advise but I was trying to connect my dir tv hddr hr21 box to my g4. Well finally after 3 days of research and trying just about every suggestion, I found a forum that advised to got to net info manager - config-dhcp then change reply_threshold_seconds value to 0 instead of 4... this worked for me.